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Re: Picts and pyramids
Nick Longrich (longrich@princeton.edu)
Sun, 5 Feb 1995 13:05:38 GMT
In article <D34nqK.MoB@eskimo.com>, hgeorge@eskimo.com (Harry George) wrote:
> I should have said I was looking for out-and-out killers for this
> conjecture. It is for a novel, not for academic presentation, so
> I only need vague plausibility, not provability. If the evidence points
> more toward diffusion the other direction, that's the way the story
> will go.
>
> But it seemed at least plausible that there was diffusion of burial mound
> culture along the contiguous coastline from the Mediterranean, along
> the Atlantic coast, to the British Isles. Given the approximate
> dating of the mounds, parallel creation seems a harder sell. And
> it sure screws up the plotline.
>
> Also, I didn't mean that the Egyptians themselves made the contact.
> Instead, I was planning to use a Minoan-style trading culture to
> pass the concepts along. Again, the premise is that the pyramid
> concept was imported, rather than developed from roots in the
> Egyptian culture.
>
>
>
>
> In article <3g8md3$fvh@usenet.INS.CWRU.Edu>, taf2@po.CWRU.Edu says...
> >
> >
> >In a previous article, hgeorge@eskimo.com (Harry George) says:
> >
> >>Ok, this is pretty flakey, but I was wondering if anyone has considered
> >>this sequence of cultural diffusion:
> >>
> >
> >
> >
> >
> >My only question is this. What is special about the structures
> >constructed by the Picts which would cause them to be more attuned to
> >astronomy than those of anyone else (in other words, why do we need an
> >extra-mediteranean source for the pyramids being in line with the sun,
> why
> >do you suppose the Egyptians and everyone closer than Spain, for that
> >matter, were astro-illiterate)? Why is a source outside the
> >mediteranean needed to explain the pyramids at all? (I don't even want
> >to touch the topic of whether the egyptians were indo-european. Too
> >politically incorrect:)
> >
I don't know much about these Pictic structures, but the closest thing
to a pyramid you'll find is a Sumerian ziggurat. These big, stepped
temples go back even further than the pyramids. And it doesn't require an
elaborate theory of cultural transmission through sea-trading routes that
go all the way to England; people were constantly moving throughout the
Fertile Crescent and Nile delta areas;trade was quite common.
The Sumerians, I believe, originally got the idea of their stepped
pyramids from mountains: mountains, whether natural or made of clay brick,
are a way of getting closer to the gods/ heavens.
The Tower of Babel myth probably comes from these temples: a lot the
bible takes its origins from that area of the middle east.
But don't forget human inventiveness. The Aztecs developed pyramids as
well, and it's doubtful that they the idea from the Picts.
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